


The Horizon Is All We Have

by smilebackwards



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Happy Ending, M/M, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Romantic Comedy, While You Were Sleeping AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-15
Updated: 2015-12-15
Packaged: 2018-05-06 21:11:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5430899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smilebackwards/pseuds/smilebackwards
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one bright spot in Steve’s monotonous, token-collecting mornings is a flash of red hair and a slide-away smile.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Horizon Is All We Have

**Author's Note:**

> For [this](http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/622456.html?thread=85704312#t85704312) prompt.

The one bright spot in Steve’s monotonous, token-collecting mornings is a flash of red hair and a slide-away smile.

Peggy laughs indulgently from her seat beside him when he talks about his dream of someday having a five second conversation with his favorite commuter, an exchanged _hello_ or _good morning,_ just long enough to be able to tell for sure if her eyes are brown or green.

Steve doesn’t expect his chance to be quite so dramatic.

Christmas morning the station is a ghost town. Steve is whiling away the solitary overtime hours in the token booth sketching, trying to forget all the happy memories of coffee and gifts with his mother that the cancer ended abruptly five years back. The clink of a token takes him by surprise. He looks up to see his favorite commuter. Her eyes are green.

“Merry Christmas,” she offers, mouth quirked in half a smile.

Steve fumbles for the intercom but she’s gone before he can reach it. He thumps his forehead down against the desk. “Merry Christmas,” he says to himself, raising his head to watch her walk away.

There are two other commuters lingering on the platform and Steve narrows his eyes as they approach the woman. One of them makes a quick grab for her shoulder bag and she punches him in the face, strike quick as a snake bite, and executes a swift spin that cuts his legs out from under him.

Steve is rushing out of the booth, even though it looks like all he’ll need to do is applaud, when the second man shoves her over the lip of the platform.

The two assailants sprint away from the scene of the crime as Steve falls to his knees at the edge of the tracks. “Ma’am?” he calls down anxiously, “Ma’am, can you hear me?”

The woman doesn’t stir, her eyes closed, red hair flared out around her head like a pool of blood.

Steve eases himself down onto the tracks beside her. He can feel the metal vibrating under his hands. “Oh, Christ,” Steve says as the rumble of an incoming train gets louder and louder. He grabs the woman by the lapels of what is probably an incredibly expensive wool pea coat and rolls them to the marginal safety of the gap below the platform just as the train thunders past, brakes screeching.

“Oh, Christ,” Steve gasps.

-

They won’t let him see her at the hospital.

He still doesn’t even know her name, Steve realizes, watching through a glass door as she’s wheeled away on a gurney. Her face is as pale as the bedsheets.

“Steve?” someone says and Steve looks up to find Sharon, who has seen him through twenty six stitches and two bouts of pneumonia. “Are you okay?”

“I.. I’m fine,” Steve says, taking a quick pull from his inhaler so it stays the truth, and then spilling the whole sorry story all over her blue scrubs.

“I’ll sneak you in for a quick look,” Sharon says, taking pity. She grins. “We’ll say you’re the fiancé.”

-

Steve doesn’t know what happened.

It went from a quick look, just a chance to hear the reassuring beep of a heart monitor, to see the rise and fall of her chest, to being buffeted into a corner by a wave of wailing family members. 

Steve’s awkward presence had been explained by the duped medical staff as being the fiancé, his attempts at protest overwhelmed by a second wave of shocked _engaged? how could she not have told us?_ which faded into tight hugs of welcome that made Steve’s throat close up with pain.

At least he knows her name now, Steve thinks, wryly, from the supply closet he’d escaped to so he could sit on an overturned bucket and breathe into a stolen incentive spirometer.

Natasha Barnes. Daughter of George and Winifred. Granddaughter of Anne. Sister of Rebecca and the yet unseen Bucky. Goddaughter of Nick.

Steve wonders what it would be like to have so much family. It feels like such a long time since he’s had any at all. 

It’s that desperate loneliness that makes Steve pull out the business card that George pressed on him with an invite to the postponed Christmas festivities at the Barnes household that evening when his apartment is silent as a grave and Steve’s tiny fir tree in the corner is starting to drop dry needles onto the carpet.

He stands outside the two-story Georgian with a poinsettia in his hands for a long time, staring at the warm lights on in all the windows. There’s the soft sound of carols drifting out toward the sidewalk. 

Steve tries to make himself walk away because this isn’t his, it isn’t his life or his family or his _right,_ but when he finally turns to go he runs straight into Nick.

“Steven,” Nick says evenly. “Everyone will be glad you made it. Come on, it’s cold as fuck out here.”

Before Steve can protest, the front door is opening, all the golden light spilling out onto the porch and over Steve’s scuffed shoes, and Winifred is pulling him across the threshold, into the kind of hug that Steve’s spent five years missing.

Rebecca spins Steve in a circle to help unwind his scarf and guides him to a spot by the fire that he assumes ought to belong to Natasha. She presses a hastily wrapped gift with Steve’s name on it into his hands and Steve’s chest aches worse than the last overnight he spent at Memorial trying to cough up his own lungs from bronchitis. Steve fingers the taped edges, watching everyone gleefully open packages, and thinks how much they’ll hate him when they learn the truth.

He overcompensates by drinking three glasses of Anne’s 100 proof eggnog while Rebecca and Anne watch in delighted awe and only makes things worse for himself by ending up too tipsy to get a cab back to the city. Winifred clucks with more sympathy than Steve knows he deserves and convinces him to bed down on the sofa for the night. She spreads out clean sheets that smell like fabric softener and kisses Steve on the forehead before she turns out the light.

“Goodnight, sweetheart,” she says softly, from the doorway, like Steve is one of her own children.

Steve looks at the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree until the pinpoints of _redgreenblue_ blur together and muffles his tears into his pillow.

-

He wakes up to a pounding headache and whispers by the stairs.

“Shh, don’t wake up Steve, dummy,” Rebecca hisses.

“Who the heck is Steve?” a man’s voice whispers back.

“Natasha’s fiancé,” Rebecca says and Steve tries not to wince, glad that his face is mashed into the back of the couch, out of view.

“Fiancé?” the man asks, his voice loud with surprise.

“Bucky, seriously, shut _up_ ,” Rebecca admonishes. “He’s great. You’ll love him.”

Steve hears their footsteps pad away and risks moving enough to glance at his watch. He’s going to be late for work and Steve doesn’t think he can bear to lie to one more person so he pulls out his cellphone to call for a cab and gets ready to sneak out the front door.

“Good morning,” someone says. 

Steve feels like his already defective heart has just exploded. He whirls around, gasping.

Bucky Barnes is sitting on the stairs, drinking a cup of coffee. He is tragically, tragically gorgeous. His eyes are extremely blue. “Good morning, Bucky,” Steve says, numb.

Bucky looks at him curiously, unfolding himself and walking down the stairs to stand next to Steve. “Have we met? ‘Cause I think I would’ve remembered you.”

Steve can’t make his heart slow down. Bucky’s smile is ridiculously charming. “No,” Steve says. “No, but you’re Natasha’s brother, right?”

“In the flesh,” Bucky says. “And you’re--”

Steve has never been so grateful to hear a cab horn in his life. “Cab,” he says, “I mean, Steve. I’m so sorry. I’m late to work. It was nice to meet you. Please thank your parents for their hospitality,” and flees down the front steps.

When Steve looks back out the rear window of the cab, Bucky is leaning against the door jamb, waving.

Steve waves awkwardly back. He makes himself watch until the Barnes’ house disappears into the distance.

-

Winifred calls the next day to invite Steve to the house for New Year’s Eve and Steve swears he refuses politely half a dozen times but Winifred keeps the conversation going until eventually he hears himself say, “Yes, I’ll be there. Can I bring anything?”

“Just yourself, sweetheart,” Winifred says and wisely hangs up before Steve can talk himself back out of it.

Steve wasn’t looking forward to spending New Year’s Eve alone, with Peggy still in England for the holidays and Sam on tour, but he wonders if it’s really for the best to start the new year with a reminder of all the things he doesn’t have.

It’s almost a relief when his pipes freeze and the gooseneck pipe beneath the sink bursts, spraying water all over his tiny kitchen. “I’m so sorry, Winifred,” Steve says, throwing a towel down over the growing lake on the tile. “I’m going to have to track down a plumber.”

“Oh, Steve,” Winifred says sympathetically. Steve hears Rebecca ask what’s wrong in the background and Winifred telling her that he can’t make it. Rebecca makes a dismayed sound that Steve finds simultaneously warming and painful. “Don’t worry about a thing. I’ll send Bucky right over.”

“What?” Steve says, but his only response is the dial tone.

Steve hopes he heard wrong but at half past nine, Bucky knocks on his door. He’s got a bucket in one hand and a wrench in the other and Steve, in his wet socks and one of Sam’s cast off Air Force sweatshirts, stares at him in horrified embarrassment.

“Somebody call for a plumber?” Bucky asks, smiling. He looks like a model. Like someone who should be at a rooftop party in Manhattan drinking champagne, and not in Steve’s hole in the wall apartment with sink water creeping toward his boots.

“I’m so sorry,” Steve says.

“Why?” Bucky says, shoving the bucket beneath the sink. “Dad’s already asleep on the couch and Gram’s been beating me at rummy for the past two hours. This is the most exciting thing to happen all night.” He stares at the pipes, then at his wrench, then back at the pipes. “I’m not actually good at plumbing. Ma just didn’t want you to be alone,” Bucky admits. “I didn’t either,” he adds.

“Thanks,” Steve says, thickly.

They sit on the couch in front of the TV and listen to the bands play, watching video clips of all the people gathered together in Times Square downtown and across the world, waiting for the ball to drop. Bucky is warm beside him. Steve knows he should get up and bail out the bucket, but he doesn’t want to dislodge the companionable arm Bucky has draped behind his shoulders and it’s almost midnight anyway. 

“Five,” Bucky says, his smile lit with the flashing blue of the screen, “four, three, two, one... Happy New Year!”

“Happy New Year,” Steve says, and at least for this one moment, it is.

-

Steve’s always found taking down the Christmas decorations mildly depressing, but it’s different when you’re not alone. Rebecca is packing up the ornaments, bringing over her favorites to show Steve before she puts them away. She laughs as she shows him a reindeer that Bucky made out of popsicle sticks and lets him hold a pair of tiny, ceramic ballet shoes that belong to Natasha.

Steve holds the ladder steady while Bucky climbs up to take the garlands off the lintel and unhook the mistletoe from its place in the doorway.

“Ooooh,” Rebecca crows, in the voice of little sisters everywhere. “Mistletoe! You have to kiss him, Bucky.”

Bucky misses a step and almost falls off the ladder. “Geez, Becca,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck. “Steve doesn’t have to kiss me.”

“It’s tradition!” she insists.

“Yes, James, it’s tradition,” Nick says, sardonic.

Bucky glances at Steve apologetically. His hand has somehow made it to Steve’s waist. “She’ll never shut up about it,” he says, and then he leans down to brush Steve’s lips with his, chaste but warm.

 _Oh no,_ Steve thinks hysterically, feeling a flush run through him. He honestly can’t believe that he’s found a way to genuinely make this situation worse. _I like Bucky._

-

Steve doesn’t know why he bothers to tell his troubles to his manager. Phillips has no more sympathy for Steve’s dilemma than Steve’s cat which had simply sat in mute judgment until he’d given up and produced a bowl of milk.

“Rogers,” Phillips says, with considered patience. “Pull the plug.”

-

Steve agonizes about it for the next two days, googling Anne’s heart condition and checking whether sudden shocks can cause arrhythmia, but in the end he doesn’t have to do anything, because Natasha wakes up. 

The message from the hospital doesn’t give details and Steve rushes up to her room half expecting to see her surrounded by nurses with the crash cart. 

Instead, she’s sitting up in bed, face flushed with healthy color, encircled by the Barnes family. Steve falters at the threshold, grabbing the door jamb for support. Natasha looks at him and for a second her face is confused and Steve thinks _Oh, God, the moment of truth_ but then she says, “Steve,” as warmly as if they were genuinely engaged, and reaches out a hand.

“I’m so glad you’re okay,” Steve says, because it’s the truth, even if it means everything else is going to fall apart.

“Could I talk to Steve alone for a minute?” Natasha asks.

“Sure, sweetheart,” George says, smoothing down her blankets. “We’ll go get you something from the cafeteria.”

Bucky catches Steve’s eye as he walks out, but he looks quickly away.

“So,” Natasha says, once they’ve gone, “Engaged, huh?”

“I’m so sorry,” Steve says. “When they brought you in, the staff wouldn’t tell me anything because I wasn’t family and things just spun out of control. I didn’t mean for this to happen.”

“Steve,” Natasha says, gently. “You saved my life. And practically the only thing I’ve heard since I woke up is how amazing you are.” She offers him her hand, palm up, and Steve takes it. “The Barnes family adopted me when I was ten years old. They’re going to adopt you at…”

“Twenty seven,” Steve chokes out.

“Twenty seven,” Natasha says. “And no one is happier about it than me.” She smirks, crooked. “Except maybe Bucky.”

-

The Barnes’ come back with pie for Natasha and a sandwich wrap for Steve. “No cheese,” Winifred promises, because after three weeks, she already knows all his food allergies.

“Steve and I have something to tell you,” Natasha says, cutting into her pie. “We’re breaking up.”

Bucky spits out his coke.

“Natasha,” Steve groans, and then he finally, finally explains.

“Wait, hold up,” Bucky says, before he’s even halfway through. “So you’re not engaged to my sister?”

“No,” Steve says, miserably. He turns to watch the snow falling outside the window and maybe that’s cowardice, but he doesn’t think he can bear to see the look in Bucky’s eyes before he walks away. Natasha’s wrong. What Steve has done was a gross violation of trust and--

“Oh, thank _God_ ,” Bucky says.

Steve’s head snaps around to look at him. Bucky’s closer than he expected, knelt down next to Steve’s chair. His hand is hovering beside Steve’s cheek and Steve can count his eyelashes as he leans forward and pauses and says, “Steve, d’you..” 

Steve surges forward to kiss him, because of course he does, of course he loves him.

“So, we still get to keep him, right?” Rebecca asks.

-

_Clink. Clink. Clink._

Steve pulls the tokens toward him without looking, his other hand busy sketching a picture of Bucky, shading a five o’clock shadow onto his sharp jawline. It’s strange how this part of his life is still the same when everything else is suddenly, wonderfully different. 

_Clink. Clink. **Clunk.**_

The oddly heavy sound of metal in the token collector makes Steve glance up. Sometimes tourists will try to use quarters. 

It’s not a quarter. It’s a wedding band. The gold is warm to the touch like it’s been on someone’s finger or clenched in their fist. 

“So, look,” Bucky says, as Steve holds the ring up to the light, disbelieving. There’s tarnish at the edges and from what Steve knows of the Barnes family, it’s likely an heirloom, handed down the generations. “I know this is kind of fast but you didn’t seem opposed to quick engagements. I mean you got fake engaged to Nat in about five seconds flat where as I’ve had five whole weeks to be completely crazy about you. Anyway, what do you say? Marry me?”

Steve presses the intercom with a trembling hand. “Yeah,” he says.

“Yeah?” Bucky repeats, smiling.

“Yes,” Steve says, stronger. He presses the button to release the turnstile, but Bucky’s already leapt over it and is crowding into the booth, pressing a kiss against Steve’s mouth. 

“Then stop fiddling with the ring and put it on, Rogers,” Bucky teases.

Steve rolls his eyes and slides the ring over his knuckles. “Jerk.”

“Punk,” Bucky says, fondly, and kisses him again.


End file.
